by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
B Rated R 113 min.
Once I heard the premise for the horror flick, Thirty Days of Night, I thought, “Damn, what a cool idea! Hope they don’t screw it up.” They don’t. With great source material from the original graphic novel series plus a director (David Slade) and producer (Sam Raimi) who are willing to honor the source material and do it justice, 30 Days of Night makes for some damn good movie horror.
30 Days of Night was originally a miniseries of comics illustrated by Ben Templesmith and written by Steve Niles. The series, like the movie, takes place in the desolate Barrow, Alaska, near enough to the Artic Circle that residents experience thirty days of darkness during the winter. Vampires, taking advantage of this phenomena and the isolation of the town during those thirty days, descend upon the vampire equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Barrow is a town so small that when Stella Olemaun (Melissa George) has an accident trying to catch the last plane out before the thirty days begins, she knows the person who hit her by name. There are no strangers here.
Meanwhile, Stella’s estranged husband, Sherriff Eban Olemaun (Josh Hartnett) is investigating all sorts of mysterious happenings around town. A number of phones were burned in the snow; there were horrific animal killings and vandalism. Each event is designed to isolate the already lonely town even further.
Stella doesn’t make it to the airport in time and is stuck in town for the month. She’s there when Eban arrests a suspicious stranger at the town’s only diner. From the jail cell the stranger beings prophesying their doom in mysterious phrases whilst being really, really creepy. Kudos to actor Ben Foster for creeping me out.
With our first glimpse of the beasts, we learn that these vampires aren’t the beautiful, tormented vampires that you might find in an Ann Rice novel. First off, they ain’t pretty, what with the nasty teeth and the freaky eyes. Plus, these guys are messy eaters. No elegant trickle of blood in the corner of their mouth for them.
I’ve never seen so much blood in a movie. Maybe I’m not watching enough horror flicks, but frame for frame, this flick has more blood than a blood bank. It’s all over the place, staining the snow, coating dead bodies, and covering the vampires from the chin down. I’m betting that most of the actors who played the vampires in the movie never want to see red again. For such efficient hunters, they’re extremely wasteful of their primary sustenance, spilling blood across the landscape, across their clothes, smeared in their hair and spattered everywhere else.
At first, I thought the vampires were scarier when we didn’t see them. When they moved by so fast and could take a person so quickly that it was hard to know what they were. After seeing them a few more times, I was actually more scared of them. At one point in the movie, I was annoyed by the vampires’ stupidity. They were going after someone who, if they had any intelligence at all, would know to be an obvious distraction. Then I realized the vamps were just arrogant. With thirty full days of darkness and an isolated town, they had the luxury of playing with their food.
The flick does have the usual horror movie pitfalls (clichés, some mediocre acting) but the core of would-be victims are developed enough that you care for their survival. Tension and body count more than made up for most of these little annoyances. Largely, humor was thankfully absent from the movie, since it just wouldn’t have jibed with the dire situation.
There are more comics and stories in the 30 Days series. There are several graphic novels that deal with the years after this initial attack, following some of the characters and also coming back to Barrow. I’ve not read them, but I’d like to see what the tough people of Barrow could do to these villainous vampires with just a little more preparation and knowledge.
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